17 April 2009

After I jumped at Rawhide for daily use, I live with the new Firefox (3.1 Beta 3, to be renamed 3.5), which overall is a better browser but I have a huge annoyance: closing the last tab will close the browser entirely (I think I can figure the rationale behind the new behaviour, even if I don't like it).

After a normal working session (with 3-15 tabs), I close them one by one, when I have no need for them any more, until I get to a single one. Then I start something entirely different, by typing a new URL in the address bar or going to a saved bookmark... but not want to send the old URL as referrer for a lot of reasons. In this case I used to close the last tab and start with an empty one and clean history, but it does not work any more.

My current workaround was to set the home page to "about:blank", add the Home icon tot he toolbar and train myself in using that Home icon (don't remember when I have used it the last time). This is some impact on my workflow.

Update: thanks to an anonymous comment, teh solution is to set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false in about:config.

6 comments:

"Then I start something entirely different, by typing a new URL in the address bar or going to a saved bookmark... but not want to send the old URL as referrer for a lot of reasons."

Browser has no reason to send current URL in referrer header when you type new URL into address bar or open bookmark. FF 3.0.x does not do so, if 3.1/3.5 does for some reason, that sounds like a bug that should get fixed.

If you type a URL in the location bar there should be no 'referer' header sent to the server. The site you're leaving don't have a reference to the new site, and there is no connection "old site"->"new site", so you should not be worried about this.